Vestenya Ruo
Vestenya Ruo was a Shuos cadet in the heptarchate. The first friend and lover of Garach Jedao Shkan during their first year at Shuos Academy, he appears in Ninefox Gambit and the flashfic Black Squirrels, and is mentioned in Revenant Gun and Glass Cannon. Appearance and Personality Ruo had dark brown skin,Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels blunt, steady fingers, a tenor voice, an unexpected liking for fruit candies, and always broke left when startled.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22 His features were finely made and he kept his masses of hair in a ponytail.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon Competitive and impulsive, he was a better shot than Jedao and intended to keep it that way, but envied Jedao's reflexes and situational awareness. He customarily greeted Jedao with a kiss on top of the head. He came up with terrific pranks and thought nothing of picking random fights for amusement.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22 With a talent for making risks sound fun, he frequently led Jedao into trouble.Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels History Ruo entered Shuos Academy in 826.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon He picked a fight with Jedao at a party and the two began to hang out shortly afterwards, becoming best friends. They developed a theory that their heptarch had picked the cadet uniform colors to make them easier to assassinate from a distance,Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22 and shared a rivalry over marksmanship scoresHexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon and a private belief in the rumor that the Academy carp were fitted with surveillance cameras. On one occasion, after a night of mutually enjoyable hallucinations brought on by a drinking game with unlabeled bottles from the Academy's contraband stash, Ruo and Jedao went squirrel-fishing by the carp pond, attempting to lure squirrels closer with nuts tied to fishing lines.Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels Another prank thought up by Ruo involved color-coded squirrels. After Jedao mentioned that his mother liked to tell him "Don't scare the geese," Ruo found many opportunities to repeat the line to his friend. Ruo was on the Academy's assassin track and periodically tried to get Jedao to declare for it with him, but Jedao remained undecided.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22 Jedao nursed a long crush on Ruo, eventually consummated in a tryst in the Academy gardens. Jedao's first and During the yearly game competition, Ruo designed and entered a shooter. He discussed it with Jedao while coding the game, though Jedao declined to help by playtesting it. The game averaged high middle for its category. Despite Ruo's efforts, along with those of Jedao's current girlfriend Lirov Yeren, he couldn't get Jedao to admit having entered a game at all, much less what it might be. He was therefore unaware that Jedao had indeed entered anonymously, with a game designed to score points by manipulating others into small heresies. Rather than using the anonymous game to manipulate a fellow student, Ruo attempted to frame a visiting Rahal magistrate, was caught, and committed suicide by gunshot to the side of his head rather than face being tortured to death for the infraction. A third-year cadet, Chenoi Tiana, claimed credit for the game before Jedao heard about Ruo's death, and was praised by her instructors. Though Jedao affected coldness at news of the suicide and never revealed his involvement, his best friend's death due to his anonymous game opened his eyes to the human cost of the faction system and set him on his eventual path toward the goal of bringing down the heptarchate, switching to the Shuos Infantry track, the assassin track which Ruo had taken, as a first step.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22 Jedao's creation of the game was eventually discovered, though he was never privy to that fact, and all information about Ruo's death was deeply classified.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.219-220 Several hundred years later, most of Jedao's memories of Ruo passed to Ajewen Cheris.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 21 Jedao remembered only his initial friendship with Ruo,Revenant Gun, Chapter 1 including such incidents as wrestling, squirrel-fishing,Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon and playing video games, but nothing about Ruo's other family, other details about him, their later intimacy, or his fate. Waking up in a strange place, he initially believed that Ruo had played a trick on him, but realized quickly that such a comprehensive prank would not have been possible. The mothgrid of the Revenant had no information about Ruo.Revenant Gun, Chapter 1,9 When he asked Cheris about Ruo's fate, she claimed to know little other than that he had died young.Revenant Gun, Chapter 35 Jedao learned Ruo's true fate two years later. Trivia * Cheris recalled some of Jedao and Ruo's adventures, including their "enhanced liquor" drinking game, Ruo suggesting targets for Jedao in the common cadet prank of befouling other cadets' uniforms, and Ruo being cared for by Jedao during a nauseous hangover, while at Avros Base. * Like Jedao, Ruo enjoyed wine-of-roses.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon References Category:Humans Category:Deceased Category:Heptarchate Category:Stubs Category:Factionless Category:Shuos